


breathing's just a rhythm

by decrescendo



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Post-Season/Series 03, Translation Available
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-07-30
Packaged: 2020-07-27 12:09:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20045779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/decrescendo/pseuds/decrescendo
Summary: “Oh, sweetheart,” murmurs Joyce. “I know it’s not easy.”This doesn’t feelnot easy. This feels impossible—impossible, adjective, I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E. Something you can’t do, even if you really want to, even when you try your hardest. Saving Hop was impossible, Joyce had told her. Living without him feels impossible, too.(Or, El Hopper, and learning how to heal.)





	breathing's just a rhythm

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Español available: [respiración es sólo un ritmo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24462154) by [decrescendo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/decrescendo/pseuds/decrescendo)

> Spanish translation available [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24462154).

She ends up back in the Wheelers’ basement, after. She doesn’t remember much of how she got there. Joyce had said at one point that she could sleep in Will’s room, and Mike’s mom said something about sharing with Nancy, and she thinks she can remember Max holding tightly onto her in the back of the ambulance whispering _please come stay with me, _but none of those things ended up happening and now she’s on Mike’s couch, alone with Mike, and he’s holding her and running his fingers through her hair.

She isn’t crying anymore, but she can’t remember stopping. What she can remember is that when she first started crying, as her knees hit the ground in the parking lot and Joyce let go of Will to run to her, she felt like it would never end. She thought her chest would ache like this forever and the tears would just keep coming and she would never be able to speak again around the sobs that shook her entire body.

The tears are gone now, but her chest still hurts and her stomach feels empty and tight all at once. Mike is saying something, she thinks, but she can’t tell what. It feels a little like when she first escaped the lab and there were so many words she didn’t know that when Mike and Lucas and Dustin talked it mostly just sounded like noise to her.

Mike has held her like this lots of times—in her room, in his room, on this very couch. She associates his arms with safety, with warmth, with a fluttery feeling somewhere in her middle that she thinks must be what the TV shows call _love _and what Hop would call _inappropriate, you’re too young for that. _Right now, though, the fluttery feeling doesn’t come, and she isn’t warm. She isn’t cold either. She isn’t anything.

These are the wrong arms. They’re too short, too skinny, too attached to a boy who called her dad _ridiculous _and _overprotective _and _kind of an asshole sometimes _too many times. Her dad is all of those things, she knows. Or, he was all of those things. But now, just like her, he isn’t anything at all.

Her life had started in Mike Wheeler’s basement, and now it feels like it’s ending here, too.

—

Hop wanted her to stay with the Byers if this happened. At least, that’s what Joyce tells her when she comes to get El from Mike’s house the next morning. She says it like it’s a question, like she’s asking El’s permission, but El already knows that she doesn’t have a choice. There’s nowhere else in the world that she could go.

When she steps into the Byers’ living room, Jonathan and Will both smile at her from where they’re sitting at opposite ends of the couch. They’re watching a movie that she hasn’t seen before. “Hey, El,” says Jonathan, lifting his hand in a little wave.

“Hi,” says El. Her voice sounds rough, like it did last winter when she had a bad cold and Hop made her stay in bed and drink awful-tasting medicine.

Joyce comes in behind her and puts an arm around her shoulders. “Why don’t you sit down with the boys and watch the movie while I make us some lunch?”

“We just started it,” says Will. “We can rewind it for you so you know what’s going on.”

El doesn’t really care about watching the movie. She already knows she won’t be able to pay attention to it. But she gets the feeling that she’s supposed to agree, and she isn’t sure what else she would do if she _didn’t _agree, so nods and goes to sit down between Will and Jonathan.

Both of them keep turning to look at her. They don’t seem to think she can tell.

—

_Funeral _is a new word. Joyce’s face crumples a bit when El asks her what it means.

“It’s a…a thing people do to remember someone when they pass away,” she says.

“Pass…away?” asks El. She knows what those words mean on their own, but she can’t remember ever hearing them together like this.

Joyce looks even more broken at that. She looks like that a lot lately—broken, tired, confused. “It’s a nicer way of saying someone has died.”

El thinks of the moment when she had looked at Joyce and known that Hop was gone, and the hole that had opened up in her chest. There isn’t a nice way of saying that, she doesn’t think, and even if there _is _a nice way she doesn’t want to use it. The whole point of words is that they give a name to the feelings, and the word for her dad being gone should hurt just as much as the fact of it.

“Hop passed away,” she says slowly, trying out the words. “Hop died.”

“Yeah, sweetheart,” says Joyce. Then she adds in a whisper, “I’m so sorry.”

She’s said that a lot these past few days. El isn’t sure why she’s apologizing.

—

She hasn’t had an Eggo since before it happened, she realizes suddenly. She isn’t sure why the thought makes her hands and feet lose their feeling. For a brief moment, she considers asking Joyce to get some for her. Then she thinks about Hop rolling his eyes as she poured chocolate syrup all over her Triple-Decker Eggo Extravaganzas, pretending it was gross how sweet she liked them even though he always stole a bite.

It was Mike who gave her Eggos first, not her dad. But it was her dad’s Eggos that led her to her very first home. It was her dad that always insisted Eggos weren’t an acceptable meal and El would argue that they were just as healthy as pancakes or French toast and her dad would grumble a bit and sometimes give in, but usually not.

Joyce would let her put as much chocolate on them as she wanted. She would let El eat them for every meal, probably, if she asked. But she isn’t going to ask.

—

The funeral is different than she expected. It happens in a church and a man dressed in black robes says a lot of things about God that El doesn’t understand. It sounds like _mumbo-jumbo, _which is what Hop always called it when he lost track of what the characters in her favorite soap operas were talking about.

Joyce had told her it was kind of like a celebration. She said the people who loved the dead person most would say nice things about them, and tell funny stories that would make everyone laugh. But El isn’t saying anything, and neither is Joyce, and she’s pretty sure that the man with the glasses talking about working with the Chief isn’t one of the people who loved him most.

She doesn’t really understand why they’re putting a box in the ground, either. Her dad isn’t in that box. Her dad isn’t anywhere, because his strong arms and soft belly and weird mustache that she never liked all turned into ash when the explosion happened. But Joyce tells her quietly that she’s supposed to throw a handful of dirt on top of the box, so that’s what she does, and then she wipes her hand down the side of the black dress she borrowed from Nancy and pretends that this strange ceremony means anything to her.

She’s sweating. It feels strange that the sun is out.

—

On her ninth morning with the Byers she overhears Joyce and Jonathan talking in the kitchen. It’s early and she hasn’t yet gotten up from her makeshift bed on the couch, or even opened her eyes, so they must think she’s still asleep.

“…been too long,” Joyce is saying. “The poor girl needs to start sleeping in a real bed.”

The poor girl. _That’s me, _El thinks.

“At least she’s sleeping,” says Jonathan. “That’s an improvement, right?”

She isn’t sleeping, not at all, but she’s glad that they think she is. It had made Joyce sad when she refused to go to bed the first few nights, and even sadder when she tried to go to bed and then couldn’t fall asleep. She doesn’t want to make Joyce sadder than she already is, so she’s started pretending.

“I guess,” sighs Joyce. “I asked Will yesterday.”

“And?”

Joyce laughs a little, but it doesn’t sound happy to El. “You know how he is. He wouldn’t have said no even if he didn’t want to. But I think he really is okay with sharing a room.”

“I’m sure he is,” says Jonathan. “You want to try to move her in today?”

El sits up suddenly enough that the quilt slides onto the floor. In the kitchen, Joyce and Jonathan go silent. Then she hears a chair scraping across the floor and Joyce comes into the living room.

“Hey, honey,” she says brightly. “How’d you sleep?”

She doesn’t want Joyce to pretend that she doesn’t know El overheard them, so she ignores the question and just says, “Not moving.”

Joyce sighs and comes to sit at the end of the couch by El’s feet. “It has to happen sometime,” she says quietly.

El shakes her head. “No,” she says. _No, what? _she hears in her head, and she tries to push the image of Hop’s teaching face out of her mind. He’s not around to care if she uses complete sentences.

“You don’t have to think of this as your home,” says Joyce, and El hates how gentle her voice sounds. “I know it’s too soon for that. But we can’t just pretend that this is temporary, sweetheart.”

She knows this isn’t temporary, she _knows _that, but she can’t bring herself to think about really moving in with the Byers. But she doesn’t know how to explain the reasons for that to herself, much less to Joyce, so she just shakes her head again. “Not yet,” she pleads.

Joyce lets out another sigh and rests her hand on El’s ankle, rubbing it gently with her thumb. “Okay. Not yet.”

—

Will is a good friend. He always has been. He’s quiet and kind and understands El’s experiences with the Upside Down better than anyone. And right now, El can hardly look at him without wanting to scream.

None of this is his fault. It’s her own fault, if anything, for opening the gate in the first place, several years and a whole lifetime ago. But every time she sees him wander out of his bedroom with his hair sticking up, or hug his mom, or sit down for dinner at a table he’s known his whole life, she’s reminded that she doesn’t get to do those things anymore and she _hates _him for it.

She catches herself wishing that Hop had come back instead of Joyce. Will is luckier than she is, she tells herself. He has his brother, and he’s always had a home, and his life was normal until just recently. She’s had to go through more than him. She deserves her dad more than he deserves his mom. And she feels so guilty for thinking that.

She can’t stop herself, though. The only thing she can do is stay away from him. It doesn’t make the hurt go away, not even a little bit, but she’s scared that if she talks to Will she won’t be able to stop herself from saying all the ugly things that are in her mind.

—

She didn’t talk to Mike at the funeral. She didn’t talk to anyone, really, but she especially didn’t talk to Mike, and she still hasn’t talked to him in the days since even though he’s called her every day and even come to the Byers’ house to try and see her.

When Joyce asks her why she doesn’t want to talk to him, she just shrugs. She doesn’t really know how to say that she’s angry at Mike for clashing with Hop so much, especially since she’s only started being angry about it now that it won’t ever happen again. She doesn’t know how to say that she’s angry that it was Mike, not her, that Hop talked to last. She doesn’t know how to say that she’s angry that Mike got to know him for longer.

Part of her wonders why she’s forcing herself to lose Mike, too, when she’s already lost her dad. But then she pictures Mike’s face when he would make fun of Hop, and her own face when she would laugh along with him, and the shame rises up in her so fast that it makes her feel sick.

—

A week after the funeral, Joyce sits down across from her while she’s pretending to eat the eggs Jonathan made her.

“Sweetheart,” she begins carefully, “I know you haven’t wanted to settle into this house with us. And I understand, I really do, but you can’t sleep on the couch forever.”

El doesn’t want to sleep on the Byers’ couch forever. What she really wants is to go home and sleep in her own bed where she can hear Hop snoring from the next room. She doesn’t say that to Joyce, though, because she knows exactly what face Joyce will make, all sorry and sad. Pity. She doesn’t want Joyce’s pity.

“We’re going to move some things around in Will’s room so we can fit an extra bed in there. It’ll be your room, too, now. We’ll get your things moved over here from the cabin. Okay?”

She thinks of her room in the cabin, which Hop had helped her decorate after they decided she was staying with him for good. It’s the only room she’s ever had that’s been just hers, and she can’t picture any of her things being somewhere else.

Once she moves her things to Joyce’s house, it makes it permanent—P-E-R-M-A-N-E-N-T, something that lasts forever. She doesn’t like that idea. She did like it, once—when Hop had said she could stay with him and be his kid, she’d liked the idea of permanence. But now it scares her how _long _forever is.

Her dad being gone is going to last forever.

She realizes that Joyce is still looking at her, waiting for an answer. “Okay,” she whispers.

—

“Why are you avoiding me?” asks Will on their fourth night of sharing a room. The lights have been off for long enough that El had thought he was asleep.

She’s facing away from him, curled on her side. “Not avoiding,” she says into the darkness.

He huffs quietly. “Yeah, you are.”

He’s right, and it occurs to her that she’s just lied to him without even thinking about it. She wonders whether she’s told any other lies recently and not noticed.

When she doesn’t say anything else, Will continues. “I know you’re sad, okay? I’m not expecting you to go back to normal. I just, I don’t understand why you’re acting like you hate me all of a sudden.”

And El doesn’t know how to respond to that, because she _does _hate him all of a sudden, kind of, but not for reasons that are actually his fault.

“El.” She hears his sheets rustling, and then the bed creaking as he sits up. “Come on. Can we just…talk, maybe?”

She doesn’t want to talk, not to Will or anyone, and she especially doesn’t want to talk about this. But she hadn’t really thought that Will had noticed her avoiding him, and if he has noticed then he’s probably hurt by it, and she doesn’t want to hurt him. Even on her worst days when she wishes her dad were here instead of Joyce she can’t really wish that Will was hurting.

She rolls onto her back and turns her neck to look at him. She can just barely see his outline. “We can talk,” she says quietly.

“Good,” says Will, but then he stops. He seems like he doesn’t actually know what to say, like he wasn’t expecting her to agree. “So…why _are _you avoiding me?”

She doesn’t know how to answer that question any better than she did a moment ago, though. She doesn’t know how to put all her anger into words, especially when it doesn’t even make sense to herself. So she just shrugs, hoping that Will will be able to see the movement in the darkness.

He sighs. “Okay. Bad question, I guess. I just…” She can hear him shifting around the way he always does when he isn’t certain about something. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong, okay? I just want to be here for you. All this stuff, with the Mind Flayer and the Upside Down, it…it just sucks, you know? And I’m sorry about all of it, and I’m sorry about Hopper, and I want to be able to help you. But you won’t even stay in the same room as me except when we’re sleeping and I can’t figure out why. And—” His words are getting louder and faster and more frustrated-sounding and El realizes that maybe he’s angry at her, too, as much as she’s angry at him, and she doesn’t know why. “And you’re not the only one that’s hurting, okay? I know you lost Hopper but you’re not the only one that cared about him, and Max also lost Billy, and we all went through some—some—some absolute _shit_, and now all of us feel like we’ve lost _you_, too, since you won’t even _talk _to any of us, and Mike is freaking out about it—”

He breaks off when El sits up suddenly, but she doesn’t say anything. She just looks at his outline in the dark, breathing hard for some reason even though she was just lying still.

_Worse for me,_ she wants to say, because it’s true—she’s the only one who lost a parent and a home, and none of the others can understand that. But Will also has a point, she thinks. Bad things happened to the others too. And she knows that being mad at Will doesn’t really make sense. _It isn’t logical_—that’s what Dustin would say about it. It suddenly feels like it’s been a long time since she’s talked to Dustin.

_Talking about it might help, _she remembers her dad telling her. He would say that sometimes when she woke up from nightmares or when her chest got tight at things that shouldn’t have been scary. And her dad was wrong about a lot of things but he was right about a lot of things, too, so maybe he was right about this.

“Sorry,” she says to Will. And that one word isn’t enough for all of the thoughts that are in her head, but Will seems to understand, because his outline gets a little less angry-looking.

“Me too,” he tells her.

She isn’t really sure what either of them are apologizing for. But when they both lie back down, she feels a little bit better.

—

She wonders if it’s normal that she hasn’t cried since the day it happened.

Hop would know if it’s normal. He lost his little girl, once, and El thinks it must have felt a lot like this. But he isn’t around for her to ask.

—

El wakes up slowly. As soon as she becomes aware that she had been dreaming, she squeezes her eyes shut, trying to return to the dream even though she knows that isn’t possible.

Hop had been standing at the sink in the cabin, washing dishes. He’d been humming, and she couldn’t place the song, but it felt warm and familiar and safe. She doesn’t remember whether she was sitting at the table or standing next to him—both, somehow, it feels like—but she remembers feeling so relieved that she was almost dizzy. Then she’d said his name, and reached out for him, and as soon as he turned toward her—

She opens her eyes again and looks across the room. Will is turned away from her but she can see him breathing deeply, sound asleep.

She doesn’t want to wake him. He sleeps so little, she knows. But she’d come so close to touching Hop in her dream, _so close, _and now all the empty space around her feels colder and darker than even the Upside Down. She used to have nightmares about the Upside Down. She had them often, and her dad was always there to hold her afterwards. He would pull her to his chest and talk quietly into her hair and rock her back and forth.

It’s all backwards, now. The dream is the happy part, and the nightmare is when she wakes up.

Joyce has told her, more than once, that she can always go to her if she needs anything. Right now, El thinks, she needs to not be alone.

She knocks lightly on Joyce’s door, not expecting a response. To her surprise, though, she’s answered with a quiet, “Come in.”

Joyce is sitting up in bed with the lamp on and a book in her lap even though it’s the middle of the night. She smiles a little when she sees El, but then her face changes to something more concerned. “You okay, baby?” she asks quietly, in a way that sounds like she already knows the answer.

El hesitates, and then shakes her head.

Joyce’s eyes are soft with understanding. She sets her book down and pats the space next to her on the bed. El climbs up next to her and pulls her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them tightly.

Joyce’s hand is on her back, rubbing light circles. El focuses on that sensation as she presses her forehead to her knees and tries to breathe. “Do you want to talk about it?” asks Joyce after awhile.

She shakes her head. Words are hard in the best times, and right now, she doesn’t think she could find the ones she needed even if she wanted to.

“Okay,” says Joyce softly. “You can stay in here as long as you need to, okay?”

El stays curled up next to Joyce for hours, long after Joyce has turned out the light and gone to sleep. For El, sleep doesn’t come.

—

She wakes one morning to Will shaking her shoulder.

“El,” he’s saying, half-whispered. “_El. _Come on, wake up.”

She sits up, confused and a little annoyed, and squints at him. “What?”

“Dustin’s here,” says Will. “He’s waiting outside. He said, and I quote, ‘El is contractually obligated by the terms of our friendship to come talk to me immediately, and if she says no, I will have to exercise the rule of law to drag her out of bed myself.’”

El doesn’t know what half those words mean, and she’s pretty sure it wouldn’t make sense even if she did know the words. She understands what Will is getting at, though, and she decides she would rather get up on her own than have Dustin make a scene out of it.

Dustin is standing on the porch when she opens the front door a few minutes later. He’s wearing his favorite hat and one of his t-shirts that she doesn’t understand and his backpack, and his mouth stretches into a huge grin when he sees her. She hasn’t seen him since the funeral, which feels like a really long time ago even though it wasn’t, really. It surprises her to realize, now that he’s standing in front of her, how much she missed him.

“El!” he says, excited. “Good to see you.”

“You too,” she says, and she can’t quite bring herself to smile the way he’s smiling, but she means what she says. She looks him up and down. He’s still just standing there, like he expects something from her, but she doesn’t know what. “Do you…want to come in?”

“Nope,” says Dustin. “I want you to come out here.” Without waiting for a response, he turns and goes to sit on the little couch on the porch. After a moment’s hesitation, El steps outside to sit down beside him.

She realizes as she looks out across the front yard that it’s the first time she’s been outside in days. Joyce has dragged her out a couple times, to the grocery store or on short walks, but mostly El has spent the days in her bedroom or in the Byers’ living room.

“So,” says Dustin, once he’s made himself comfortable. “It has come to my attention that you’re refusing to talk to any of our friends except the one you live with.”

She opens her mouth to protest, but Dustin cuts her off before she can speak, which is good since she isn’t sure what she would have said anyway.

“I’m not here to scold you,” he says. “I’m just here to talk, because I know what it’s like, and I know how much talking to people who _don’t _know what it’s like sucks actual ass.”

El wrinkles her eyebrows at him, confused. She doesn’t know what Dustin would understand about the Mind Flayer that the rest of them don’t, especially since the one person she _has _talked to is the one who dealt with it all the most. “What…what’s like?”

Dustin sighs, and he looks serious suddenly—really serious, which doesn’t happen very often. “El, you know my dad died too, right?”

She didn’t know that. She feels like she should have. She shakes her head.

“It was a long time ago,” says Dustin. “Before we moved to Hawkins. That’s _why _we moved to Hawkins, actually. Fresh start and all that.”

El doesn’t know what to say, so she just says, quietly, “Oh.”

“Yeah. So, you know, I get it, okay?”

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen Dustin unhappy. Not a kind of unhappy that lasts, anyway. He isn’t happy when he loses on his Atari and he isn’t happy when it rains on a day he wanted to go hiking and he definitely isn’t happy when they’re all fighting Upside Down monsters, but in between all of those things, Dustin smiles a lot. El doesn’t feel like she’ll ever smile again. “How did you…”

“How did I stop being sad?” he fills in when she trails off. “I don’t know. It just…happened, I guess. There started being more good days and less bad days and eventually I got happy again. Not all the time,” he adds, looking at her very seriously. “He’s still my dad, and he’s still dead, and I still miss him, you know? But it gets better. It just takes time.”

El has a lot of that. She has nothing _but _time, it feels like—days and weeks and months and years stretching ahead of her that feel so empty, so strange, so scary without Hop there to guide her through them. “Promise?” she whispers.

Dustin gives her a smile—not his big one that shows all his teeth and makes his eyes disappear, but smaller, softer one. “I promise,” he tells her.

—

Being with her other friends gets a little easier after that. She isn’t ready to have _fun _with them, exactly, but she starts going to their houses again sometimes, and when they come over to the Byers’, she joins them instead of pretending to sleep in her and Will’s room.

She spends a lot of time with Max especially. They don’t do anything crazy, nothing like the trip to the mall on the first day they really hung out with just the two of them. There isn’t a mall to go to anymore, anyway. Instead they do quieter things, like watching movies and playing board games. Max teaches her to braid her hair, and lets El practice on her as much as she wants. Joyce laughs the day she comes home to find them each with at least six messy braids sticking out of their heads. It’s a pretty sound, one that El hasn’t heard in a long time.

They don’t talk about Billy. They don’t talk about Hop.

—

Just as she’s about to knock on Joyce’s door, she hears muffled voices from inside. She holds her hand still in the air, trying to breathe quietly enough to hear what they’re saying.

There’s a deeper voice mumbling something—Jonathan, she realizes, though he should be asleep by now. They all should be, herself included.

Joyce’s voice comes more clearly. “No, no, no,” she’s saying, and El can tell that she’s crying. It makes her heart squeeze up in her chest to hear, and makes her feel guilty for coming tonight to seek Joyce’s comfort.

“Mom,” says Jonathan, louder now, “you can’t do this to yourself. Come on, you can’t—”

“I killed him,” Joyce sobs. “_I killed him._”

“No, Mom, you didn’t—” starts Jonathan, but El pulls away from the door before she can hear anything else.

Her heart is pounding so hard that she feels lightheaded and there’s a sensation like ice water pooling in her stomach. She can hear Joyce’s words echoing in her brain again and again and she presses her hands over her ears as if that will help. _I killed him, I killed him._

She knows Joyce doesn’t mean it the way it sounds. Joyce loved her dad, _loves _him, El is certain of that. Still, she can’t help the feeling of betrayal that’s rushing through her. She wants to pound on Joyce’s door, or better yet just break it down, and scream at her until her voice is gone. She wishes she still had screams that could shatter glass. She wants to break every window in the Byers’ house, maybe all of Hawkins. She wants to scream at Jonathan, too, and even Will, because even if it was an accident, even if it was the only choice, even if Will and Jonathan had nothing to do with it, nothing can change the fact that _their mom _killed _her dad _and then their mom got to come home and her dad never will.

She doesn’t do any of those things, though. Instead she goes back to her room on legs that feel numb and crawls under the covers and curls up as small as she can make herself, shaking so hard that she half expects to fall apart.

—

Going out with Mike feels strange. It’s been a long time since she’s been alone with him—it’s been since that night, she realizes, when she went back to his house after everything.

She’s not entirely certain whether he’s her boyfriend. She’s pretty sure that they got back together that day in the hospital, but she’s also pretty sure that she’s been apart from him for longer than you’re supposed to be apart from your boyfriend, and she doesn’t know whether that changes things. It feels like it might.

He takes her out for ice cream. Not at Steve’s place, because Steve’s place doesn’t exist anymore, but at a little ice cream shop far enough away from Main Street that it doesn’t feel like a risk.

“Dustin won’t shut up about Suzie,” he tells her between licks of his chocolate ice cream cone. “I mean, he wouldn’t shut about Suzie before, but now that we all know she’s real he _really _won’t shut up about her. I swear it’s like he thinks if he says her name enough times she’ll just appear in Hawkins.”

“I know,” says El, because she does. She doesn’t find it annoying the way Mike seems to, though. She’s mostly just glad that Dustin has someone who makes him so happy.

“Yeah, but it’s even worse when you’re not around,” Mike says. “I slept over with all the guys a few days ago and he _literally _would not talk about anything else.”

El has been friends with them long enough by now to know that when any of them say _literally _it usually does not mean what the dictionary says it means, so she just shrugs. “I think it’s cute.”

Mike rolls his eyes at her, but smiles. “You’re such a romantic,” he says, which makes El think that maybe they are still dating after all. But then instead of leaning over to kiss her like he usually would after saying something like that, he just takes another bite of ice cream. That makes her think that maybe they aren’t.

He’s only talking about easy things, she’s noticed. Things like Dustin and Suzie, and finally beating Lucas at Pac-Man, and Holly’s new copycat phase. He hasn’t mentioned Hop once, or any of the things that happened on the Fourth of July, like he just wants to pretend that none of it happened. She can’t tell whether he doesn’t want to talk about it himself or he’s trying not to make her sad. Either way, it mostly just feels weird, and a little bit like she’s lying.

Still, it’s nice to spend time with Mike again, and when she gets back to the Byers’ house afterwards, she finds herself missing him already.

—

El’s half of the closet is filled with clothes that Jonathan brought her from the cabin. Other than that, though, the bedroom still looks like it only belongs to Will.

All of her things are still at the cabin. All of her books, her drawings, the posters on her walls. She misses them, a little. She’d gotten used to having a room that feels like hers. But she doesn’t think that having those things here will make this room feel like hers. If anything, she thinks, it’ll make it feel even more like she’s left her home for good.

—

The next time Mike comes over, he’s got a new bike.

“It’s an early birthday present,” he tells El and Will excitedly. “At least, partially. I had to save up my allowance all summer to pay for part of it. But look, it’s got more gears than my old one, see? And the brakes don’t squeak and it just _looks _so much cooler, and…”

El can remember her first time on the back of Mike’s bike like it was yesterday, which is funny, since most things from that part of her life feel like so long ago. She remembers feeling the freest she’d ever been, and also the safest, with her arms wrapped around Mike’s chest and her chin resting on his shoulder. She’d never been in a car before, then. It was the fastest she’d ever moved.

This new bike has a smaller seat, only big enough for one person. It shouldn’t matter; it’s been a long time since she rode with Mike anyway. They’re both a lot taller now than they were two years ago. Still, she can’t help feeling a little bit betrayed. Like another part of her home has just disappeared.

—

Max and Nancy take her back to the cabin to get some of her things. For some reason it’s a little easier with them—Max maybe because she has her own fresh grief, Nancy because she’s older and smarter and stronger. Joyce is all those things, too, but El thinks that Joyce misses Hop almost as much as she herself does, and El doesn’t think she can handle Joyce’s sadness on top of her own today. Joyce doesn’t seem hurt when El tells her that. She understands, just like she always does.

Mike offered to come, too, but El doesn’t want him there for reasons she still doesn’t know how to explain.

Her chest gets tight when she opens the door. It’s bright inside even with all the lights off, sun streaming through the hole in the ceiling. She looks up into that hole, up at the shining patch of sky, and thinks about how if the Mind Flayer hadn’t reached in and grabbed her then maybe she wouldn’t have gotten hurt, maybe she could have fought better, maybe instead of taking care of her Hop could have gone down to the gate just a little bit sooner and—

“El,” says Nancy, and El realizes that she has said it a few times without her noticing. She feels a hand on her shoulder and tears her gaze away from the hole to look up into Nancy’s eyes, which are soft and warm with understanding. El feels angry, suddenly. Nancy doesn’t understand at all, not really. How could she, when she’s lived her whole life in the prettiest house El has ever seen, and both of her parents are still alive?

She shrugs away from Nancy’s hand. “Fine,” she says shortly, and she knows it isn’t a real sentence, but she doesn’t have the energy to put together all the words she needs.

The furniture is scattered, some of it overturned, and there’s broken glass everywhere. El thinks of when she first came to the cabin, and of a year later when she returned after closing the gate. It had been a mess both of those times, too, and she and her dad had cleaned it up together while listening to Jim Croce. She doesn’t think she’ll ever listen to Jim Croce again.

But they aren’t here to clean up today. Steve and Jonathan have both told her that they can do that for her, if she wants them to, and she thinks she does. So she steps over all the broken glass and goes straight into her room, trying not to look too hard at anything else on the way.

—

“And then Dustin said he didn’t need to cast protection because we could take out the monster with a _mercenary,_” Mike rants. “A mercenary! Which is total—” He breaks off, glancing over at her, and slows himself down. “Mercenary,” he repeats. “It means—”

“Stop,” says El.

Mike stops, but he also looks at her in confusion. “What?”

She’s always loved to hear him explain things to her. He gets so excited about it, even when it’s something small like treadmills or lemon pepper or Mod Podge. But Hop is the one who did most of her teaching, narrating everything he did so that she would understand it better, giving her words of the day even in the beginning when she was so quiet and so scared and hardly spoke at all. He always smiled so big when she used a new word correctly, and when she used one wrong there was a smile for that too—a softer one, followed by a careful clarification, always said gently, but not so gently it made her feel stupid and small. He’ll never get to hear her use this new word. And he’ll never again get to be the one to teach her.

“I’ll look it up myself,” she tells him.

—

She’s decided she’s a little bit glad that her powers are gone. If she still had her powers, she doesn’t think she would be able to stop herself from looking for her dad, and she isn’t sure she wants to know what she would find. If he’s in heaven like Mrs. Wheeler and Mrs. Henderson both told her he is, she might be able to find him. She found Will in the Upside Down, after all, and the way heaven was described to her it sounds a little like that. But Hop told her he didn’t know if heaven is real, and if it isn’t, she would just wander in the void for hours and never hear his voice.

It isn’t like she hears his voice now. But looking for him and not finding him would, she thinks, be worse.

—

Joyce is standing at the stove when El comes into the kitchen. She’s stirring something, but she stops and turns around when she hears El’s footsteps.

“Hey, honey,” she says, “what’s up?”

Nothing is up. She just wants a glass of water. But Joyce is still holding the wooden spoon in her hand, and her hair is a little bit puffy from the heat of the stove, and she’s looking at El with a smile, and her voice sounds so warm, and so normal, like El has been wandering into her kitchen for a glass of water her entire life, and all of a sudden El feels a hurt in her lungs different from the ache that’s been there since Hop died.

She wants to apologize to Joyce and she isn’t even sure why. She wants to tell her that she knows about what Joyce told Jonathan that night, and that it’s okay. She wants to thank her for being so kind, and for just being _there, _and for giving her a place to go when there was nowhere else. But when she opens her mouth, that isn’t what comes out.

“I miss him,” she whispers, and then suddenly she’s crying.

A moment later she feels Joyce’s arms wrapped around her. She leans into her, letting herself be rocked gently back and forth, and buries her sobs in Joyce’s shoulder.

“Oh, sweetheart,” murmurs Joyce. “I know it’s not easy.”

_Easy _is a word El knows. Not from her dad—though he would have taught it to her if she’d asked him, would have spelled it out for her with a smile—but from her papa, who used to use it frequently. _This is easy, Eleven,_ he would say. _Come on, we practiced this, remember? _And then she would concentrate even harder, screwing up her face with the force of it, because only stupid people can’t do easy things and she was never stupid.

She knows what it means to not be easy, too. Forcing the demogorgon back into the Upside Down wasn’t easy, and neither was surviving in the woods. Leaving Kali wasn’t easy and closing the gate wasn’t easy and searching through Billy’s memories wasn’t easy. She’s had more than her fair share of _not easy, _she thinks.

But this doesn’t feel _not easy. _This feels impossible, and that _is _a word that her dad taught her—impossible, adjective, I-M-P-O-S-S-I-B-L-E. Something you can’t do, even if you really want to, even when you try your hardest. Saving Hop was impossible, Joyce had told her. Living without him feels impossible, too.

El doesn’t say any of this to Joyce. She just hugs her tighter and breathes in her scent, all soap and perfume and a whiff of the dinner she’d been cooking and so, so different from her dad.

—

It’s the end of August when Joyce tells them they’re moving.

“No,” Jonathan says immediately, standing up from the kitchen table. “You can’t—Mom, it’s my _senior year._”

“Honey—”

“_No,_” he says again. “I have a _life _here, Mom, you can’t just tear me away from everyone!”

Will doesn’t look angry the way Jonathan does. He’s quiet in the way that El knows means he’s upset but trying to hide it. He just stares down at his hands while Joyce and Jonathan argue.

El feels like she’s watching the scene in a TV show, like it isn’t quite real. Leaving Hawkins—she doesn’t feel happy or sad about it, she doesn’t think. She just feels numb, like she feels so often these days. _Leaving Hawkins._

Somehow, it’s not a possibility she ever considered, at least not since her brief stay in Chicago. Even after Hop died and she didn’t have a family here anymore it never occurred to her that she might actually go somewhere else. She’s lived in Hawkins her whole life, even during those years in the lab. Nearly everything that she knows about the world she knows from Hawkins.

“A fresh start,” Joyce says. “It’ll be good for all of us.”

Hawkins is home. It’s this little house that she’s just now starting to get used to, and the woods where she goes on walks with her friends, and the parking lot where Max is teaching her to skateboard. It’s Mike’s house, the first place she ever felt safe, and Mike himself, who she doesn’t really know how to be around right now, but who she knows she wants in her life for a long, long time. It’s the cabin, even though that’s gone now. It’s where Hop left her Eggos, and then kept her safe, and then became her dad.

But it’s also where she was trapped for twelve years and had things done to her that Hop called _abuse_. It’s also where she lost him.

“No monsters, no Russians,” Joyce is saying. “Just…a normal life.”

A normal life. El thought she had that, for a little while. During those few months when she had her dad and Mike and her friends all at the same time, and so much future to look forward to. That didn’t last. Maybe, if they hadn’t been in Hawkins, it would have.

She wouldn’t mind a normal life.

Jonathan has gone to stand by the window. His back is to them, but he looks tense and angry even from behind. Will has tears in his eyes. Joyce does, too. She looks across at El and asks, “Would you be okay with that, honey?”

El doesn’t have a choice, she thinks. She can’t ask the Byers to stay in Hawkins just for her, and she has nowhere else to go if she doesn’t go with them. But even though the idea of leaving is terrifying, even though the thought of losing even more of home makes her stomach hurt, she finds herself saying yes, and she finds that she’s telling the truth.

—

Living with the Byers feels more real after that. For the past few months she’s felt unsure, and unsettled, like she’s still just a guest in a house that won’t ever really be her home. And it still feels like she might not find the feeling of home again, after everything. But now she’s leaving Hawkins with them, and this new house will be new to all of them, and maybe then she won’t feel so much like she’s on the outside.

For the first time, it occurs to her that they’re going to be her family now—her for real family, not just the people she’s living with for awhile. She’s going to spend all her holidays with them. She’ll get presents from Joyce and Jonathan and Will on Christmas morning, and they’ll get presents from her, too. If she ever goes to school, Joyce will be the one who picks her up in the afternoon. If she ever moves away by herself, they’ll be the ones that she goes home to visit. For a brief, terrifying moment, she imagines having children herself, someday. Joyce will be their grandma. Jonathan and Will will be their uncles.

It hurts, undoing all the ways that she imagined the future so that she can take Hop out and put the Byers in. Maybe, she thinks, she should stop trying to imagine the future at all. She’s never managed to be right about it yet.

—

They tell their friends in Mike’s basement. 

Will was going to be the one to say it. They’d planned it out, the two of them, staying up late the night before to get the words just right. Will was going to do most of the talking, because he’s better at words than El and better at feelings than any of them. 

Once they’re actually there, though, sitting in a big circle with the rest of the Party staring at them, Will opens his mouth and nothing comes out.

“So,” says Lucas, raising his eyebrows, “what’s the big news?”

El looks over at Will. His face has turned white and his hands are shaking a little bit and he looks suddenly like he isn’t going to be able to talk without crying. So she takes a deep breath and says for both of them, “We’re moving.” There’s none of the fancy sentences that she and Will had worked on, none of the careful words. But in the end, it all just means the same thing.

Dustin and Max’s eyes go wide and El can tell that they understand right away. Lucas and Mike look confused.

“Like…to a different house?” Lucas asks.

El shakes her head. “No,” she says. “We’re leaving Hawkins.”

Max is looking back and forth between them in horror. “_Why?_”

“Fresh start,” says Will quietly.

“You can’t leave,” Mike says, in a voice like he thinks he gets to decide for them. He doesn’t look sad yet, just shocked and a little angry. “You _can’t _leave.”

“Mike.” Will says it like he’s pleading with him.

Mike doesn’t stop arguing. “Hawkins is your home,” he says, his voice getting louder. “It’s _our _home. How can your mom just make you leave? After everything you’ve already been through?”

“She—”

“It’s bullshit!” Mike yells. “Just because she doesn’t want to be here anymore doesn’t give her the right to take you away, too! And it _definitely _doesn’t give her the right to take El!”

“Where else is she supposed to go?” Will shouts back. “She can’t just hide in your basement again, dumbass!”

“Well, why not?”

“Why _not? _Because she’s a person, okay, she’s not your fucking _dog_—”

“Of course she’s not my dog, but she’s not _yours, _you don’t get to decide if she’s leaving Hawkins!”

“_I’m _not the one deciding, it’s my mom—”

“Well, since when does she—”

“_Stop it!” _shouts El.

Mike and Will go silent. They’re both breathing hard, their faces red as they stare across at one another. Then, suddenly, Mike bursts into tears.

“I can’t lose you guys,” he whispers between sobs.

Will is crying too when he says, “I’m sorry. We have to.”

El’s whole body feels cold as she watches them. She should be crying too, she thinks, and joining the big hug that Mike and Will and Dustin and Lucas have tangled themselves in. Instead she just feels sick with guilt. Mike is right. She doesn’t _have _to go with the Byers. Joyce wouldn’t make her if she really, really didn’t want to. She could figure something else out. Find someone else to be her family. She’s _choosing _to leave Hawkins, to leave Mike. She’s choosing to hurt him.

She feels arms around her and realizes that Max has scooted over and laid her head on El’s shoulder. “I’ll miss you,” she whispers.

El hugs her back, but she’s looking at Mike, who has his face hidden against Will. “I’ll miss you too,” she says.

—

“I called you stupid,” Will says suddenly one day. They’re both sitting on his bed drawing and they’ve been silent for a long time, listening to the quiet music Will’s playing. “I’m sorry.”

El sets down the colored pencil she’s using to carefully sketch a flower. “What are you talking about?”

“Mike and I were fighting. Right before…everything.” He swallows hard. He’s still looking down at his own drawing, but his hand has stilled. “I was mad that he was spending so much time with you. Lucas with Max, too. I called you guys stupid girls. I’m sorry.”

Right before everything. That seems like a long time ago to El. A whole lifetime ago, back when she thought everything was going so well. Maybe she _was _stupid then for believing it could last.

“I didn’t mean it, I swear,” says Will. He looks up at her and El can tell he’s serious. “I don’t think you’re just a stupid girl. You’re—”

“Will.” She reaches over and puts a hand on his arm. “It’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” he asks. He says it quietly and he looks so scared and El wonders, suddenly, how she could ever have been mad at him.

“I’m sure,” she says. “Anyway, Mike calls Nancy stupid sometimes. And Lucas calls Erica stupid.”

Will smiles a little at that, just the corners of his mouth twitching up. “They’re brother and sister,” he tells her, but he doesn’t say it like he’s correcting her.

El smiles back, and she thinks it’s the easiest smile that she’s managed in months.

—

Mike looks surprised when he opens his basement door to find her there. “How did you know I was here?” he asks, after a few seconds of staring at her in shock.

El shrugs. “Where else would you be?”

“Fair,” says Mike. Then, “My mom would kill me if she knew I let a girl in through the basement.”

That seems like a silly thing to be worried about, given that she lived in his basement for an entire week without his mom noticing. She just looks at him, waiting for him to realize that. When he does, he laughs a little.

“You want to come in?”

She sits down on the couch. He stays standing, awkwardly, which makes her a little nervous, but she doesn’t tell him to sit.

She takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she says.

He looks bewildered. “For what?” he asks.

“For leaving.” She looks down at her feet. Hop bought her these shoes, she thinks suddenly. “I have to, Mike. I’m sorry. I don’t want to leave _you, _it’s just—”

“El, hey.” He sits down next to her and puts his arm around her shoulder. “I’m not mad at you, okay? _I’m _sorry that I yelled when you told us. I shouldn’t have done that. I just…I’ll miss you a lot, you know?”

“I know.” For the first time since the Fourth of July, she lets herself lean into him. “I’ll miss you, too.”

They both are quiet for a few minutes, Mike rubbing her shoulder gently. Then he says, “So is Joyce, like, your new mom?”

It’s not the first time that El has thought of that. It’s the first time that someone else has said it out loud, though. And as much as it hurts to hear _new mom _in a way that means that her old dad is gone, it almost makes her smile. “Yeah,” she says, “I guess.”

“So, Jonathan is basically your brother now,” says Mike. “That’s super weird.”

It doesn’t feel weird to El. She likes it, actually. Jonathan is a good brother. She pulls away from Mike and looks up at him. “Why weird?”

Mike makes a face. “Because that means your brother is dating my sister.”

El hasn’t thought of _that_, and it startles a little bit of a laugh out of her.

“So if Nancy and Jonathan get married, and if we get married, that makes us, like, double family.” Then his face goes red and he pulls back. “Not that I think we’ll get married!” he says quickly. “I mean, not that I think we _won’t _get married, just, that’s a long time away, and I’m not thinking about that yet, _at all, _I only meant _if _it happened that would be kind of funny—”

“Mike.” He closes his mouth immediately. “It would be funny.”

She leans back into his side and after a moment, he puts his arm around her again.

—

She hasn’t been to his grave since the funeral.

She doesn’t really want to see it. She doesn’t want to see the stone that says _James Hopper, _which doesn’t feel like his real name, and she doesn’t want to stand there knowing that somewhere under her feet is an empty box that’s supposed to have his body in it but doesn’t, because his body doesn’t exist anymore.

But she’s at the cemetery anyway, holding hands with Max and looking at a different grave, the one that says _William Hargrove, _which is also a name that feels wrong. The grass on Billy’s grave is just as long as the grass on the graves next to it. It doesn’t look like it’s only been there for a couple of months.

“Hey, Billy,” says Max. “Sorry it’s been awhile. I’ve, uh, I’ve been busy.” El squeezes her hand, and Max gives her a brief smile before looking back at the stone. “I brought someone else to see you. I hope that’s okay.”

“Hi,” El says. She’s not really sure if she’s doing this right. She’s never talked to a dead person before, and she didn’t know Billy well except at the very end. But she came with Max because she wanted to tell him something, so she swallows hard and keeps speaking. “Thank you for saving me and my friends. I’m sorry we couldn’t save you too.”

It doesn’t feel like enough. Nothing will ever feel like enough, she thinks.

Afterwards, when they’re walking away from Billy’s grave, Max says quietly, “You should go see him.”

El shakes her head. “Don’t want to.”

“You should,” Max urges her. “You’re leaving Hawkins soon. It might be good to, you know, say goodbye. Before you can’t anymore.”

_I already can’t anymore, _El wants to say. She remembers what her last words to her dad were, and they weren’t a goodbye.

“It’s up to you, obviously,” says Max. “But I feel like it would be worse to not visit and then regret it.”

And maybe Max has a point. She’s thought a lot about all of the things she’s leaving behind in Hawkins—her friends, mostly, but also the Byers’ house, and the ruined cabin, and all the places that were her first ever playground, her first ever restaurant, her first ever store. She’s been trying to visit some of those places one last time before she leaves. It makes sense tovisit Hop too.

His grave isn’t far from Billy’s. She knows the way even though she hasn’t visited before, because she has thought about it a lot since the funeral, walking the path in her mind over and over. She knows his headstone from a distance. It’s bigger than most of them, and a little nicer-looking, which she guesses is because he was the chief of police even though that seems like the least important thing about him. With every step closer to it she feels like her heart is getting bigger and beating harder. By the time she’s standing in front of it, she can hardly hear or feel anything else but the pounding in her chest.

“You okay?” Max whispers.

El grips her hand a little tighter and nods. There’s that name, the wrong one, stamped into the stone in big dark letters. James Hopper. Jim Hopper. Hop. Her dad.

She feels a burning in her eyes, but she doesn’t know how to look away.

“I can go wait by the gate,” Max offers. “So you can, you know. Talk to him.”

El doesn’t want Max to go. She doesn’t want to be left alone with the hot air and the itchy grass and this stupid piece of rock that’s supposed to stand in for her dad. She shakes her head.

“Okay,” says Max, and doesn’t let go of her hand.

She stands and looks at the grave in silence for a long time. She feels a little silly, if she’s honest, talking to the stone. Eventually, though, she manages a quiet, “Hi, Hop.”

She wasn’t expecting the grave to speak back to her. Still, it hurts somewhere in the bottom of her lungs when she’s answered only by silence.

“It’s me. It’s El. I…”

She never said goodbye to him. She only hugged him, and even then, it was barely more than the _leaving-for-work_ hug or the _going-to-bed_ hug or the _thanks-for-buying-Eggos _hug. It wasn’t a goodbye hug. He never got a goodbye hug. He only got a smile and an exploding machine and this big, ugly gravestone that El is standing in front of, trying to find the words for all the things she never said.

She lets go of Max’s hand. She doesn’t turn to look at her, but out of the corner of her eye she can see Max nod in understanding and then turn to leave. Once her footsteps have disappeared, El takes a deep breath and sits down in the grass.

“It’s El,” she says again. “I don’t know if you can hear me. But Max says…I should talk. So.”

She isn’t good with words. She never has been, even with all of Hop’s help, and she probably never will be. She never had to use a lot of words with him. He always just _knew_. He could look at her face and know what she was thinking and tell her which words she needed without her having to search for them. He can’t see her face now, though. She has to figure it out herself.

“I live with Joyce now,” she says. “Me and Will share a room. They are good. Like a family. But we...” She twists her hand into the grass, pulling it out and tearing it in her fingers. “I miss you.”

Those words aren’t enough to explain the way her chest has felt hollow since he died, or that nothing tastes good to her anymore, not even Eggos, or how she can’t watch her favorite shows without his grumbling voice in the background. They’re just the words she says to Mike when it’s been a couple days since she’s seen him but she’s knows she’ll see him again soon. They’re true, though, even if it feels different from other kinds of missing people.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I…”

Some kinds of missing people only get worse when you’re reminded of them. She knows that from the way he always looked sad when he saw something that made him think of Sara, even if it was something happy. He’ll know why she didn’t come sooner.

“I’m leaving Hawkins,” she tells him. “With Joyce and Will and Jonathan. Joyce says it’s a…a fresh start.”

She thinks of the box in the cabin labeled New York, which was a big city where he used to live. He left that place for a fresh start so he could be happy again, just like she’s doing now. She wonders if his fresh start hurt as much as this does. Did he have people like the Party that he was leaving behind? She never thought to ask him that. She could ask it now, she supposes, since she’s talking to him, but she isn’t sure what the point is when she knows that he isn’t going to answer.

There are so many more things she could wishes she could say to him. She wants to tell him about the mixtape Jonathan made her, and ask him if he knows any of the songs. She wants to tell him that Joyce’s cooking is bad but it’s still better than his, which she knows would make him laugh, even though he would pretend to be mad about it. She wants to say that Joyce showed her a picture of their new house, and the yard is big and has a lot of trees in it. He would like it, she thinks. If he could come back, she thinks he wouldn’t mind living there with them.

But talking to Hop doesn’t feel like talking to Hop when he can’t say anything back. It’s only making her heart hurt more.

She stands up, and then remembers something else. “Dustin’s mom says that you’re in a better place now,” she says. “She says that you’re with Sara.” She pushes down the jealousy that she feels whenever she thinks about that. She isn’t sure it’s true, anyway. “If you are, can you…can you tell her I say hi? And tell her that…” There are tears on her face, she realizes. She isn’t sure when she started crying. “Tell her thanks for letting me share her dad.”

—

It’s strange packing up a house she hasn’t lived in for very long. There’s a lot of history here, history she’s not a part of—lines on the wall to mark Jonathan and Will’s growth, places the paint is chipped because of some _roughhousing _that Joyce remembers with a smile. There’s two whole childhoods worth of old toys and books and games.

She walks into the kitchen one morning to find a box labelled _Hopper _and for a moment, her heart stops. She stands in the doorway, staring at it, and lets herself imagine for just a few seconds that there’s a box for his things because he’s moving with them, and she’ll get to see him grumble about Joyce’s decorating choices and make everybody breakfast in a big new kitchen.

Joyce looks guilty when she looks up and realizes why El has stopped. “There’s just a few things I couldn’t get rid of,” she explains quietly, “you know?”

El knows.

—

She and Will lie side by side on the floor of their empty bedroom.

“I can’t believe we’re really leaving tomorrow,” he says quietly. “I’ve lived here my entire life, and now it’s just…”

El understands. It’s hard to believe, even after living here for only a couple of months, that she’ll never see this room again. She can’t imagine it with the wallpaper painted over, filled with someone else’s stuff. “Gone,” she says, even though it’s been a little too long for her to really be finishing his sentence.

“Yeah. I don’t know. It’s just weird.” His voice sounds far away and sad, but then he reaches over and pokes El in the side and says a little more cheerfully, “Which one of us do you think will miss Mike more?”

She feels the corners of her mouth turn up in a tiny smile. “Me,” she says. “Definitely.”

“We’re gonna be fighting all the time over who gets to talk to him on the phone. It’ll go straight to his head.”

El doesn’t know what that means. It sounds like an _expression, _words that mean something different when you put them together than they’re supposed to mean on their own. She doesn’t ask Will about it, though. Instead she just reminds him, “I’m his girlfriend.”

“Yeah, and I’m his best friend.”

“Girlfriend is more important,” she says, but she doesn’t really believe that. She doesn’t think Will does, either, because he just laughs softly at her.

It’s nice, lying on the floor like this with Will. Even with all of the bad reasons behind it, it’s nice.

The room is dark and something about how empty it is makes El feel like she can say things here that she wouldn’t admit anywhere else. She takes a deep breath. “I’m glad we’re leaving,” she says, so quietly she isn’t sure Will can hear her.

He’s silent next to her for so long that she wonders if maybe he’s fallen asleep. But then she can see his outline moving as he turns his head toward hers. “Me too,” he whispers.

There’s something sad about that, she thinks. Nothing should ever happen to two kids that’s so bad it makes them glad to leave behind all their friends and the only town they’ve ever known. It isn’t fair, all the things that have been taken from both of them.

She’s relieved, though, to know that Will feels the same way. In the darkness, she reaches out to take his hand.

—

El watches out the window as they leave Hawkins.

Joyce is driving. She’s sad-looking, but calm, gazing ahead at the road with an expression of casual determination. In the car behind them, El knows without seeing him that Jonathan is making the same face. Will doesn’t look as strong, right now, she doesn’t think. But he is strong. He’ll be okay. They all will be.

She loves them. She loves the way Jonathan cooks breakfast every morning without having to be asked, and always greets her with a smile, and teases her gently about how he’s dating the better Wheeler. She loves how quiet Will is, how he’ll sit and draw with her for hours, how he can always tell when she doesn’t want to talk and knows what to say when she does. She loves how strong he is, too, how the feeling explodes out of him in bursts, and the way he can still laugh at Jonathan’s singing and his mom’s dancing even after everything that’s happened.

She loves Joyce. She’s always loved Joyce, she thinks, ever since she held her and stroked her hair and whispered reassurances to her in that pool in the gym such a long time ago. Joyce showed her comfort and kindness even before her dad did on that day so many months before he really was her dad. Joyce cared about her even when her own child was in danger—almost like El was her child, too. Almost like she knew, even then, where they would all end up.

It’s not the family she expected. But she can’t quite feel sad, exactly, that it’s the one she ended up with.

It’s a strange and mixed-up feeling—_complicated, _Hop had told her once. Something that’s hard to understand because there are so many parts to it. He had been talking about nutrients, then, and why she needed to eat peas so that she could get strong, but there are so many parts to this, too. All this sadness and joy and hurt and love, all mixed up with each other.

She wonders if this is how Hop felt about her, after Sara. _A deep dark cave, _he said it was like. El understands that now. She understands it better than anything, the cave. She’s been stuck in it herself, and she almost doesn’t want to find the light again, as if finding the light means that she’s forgetting him.

But he’d also said he was happy again. Even after losing Sara, once he found El, he was happy again.

She can feel it against her chest, her dad’s last letter folded up in the pocket of her dad’s old shirt. She can still feel the tears drying on her cheeks, can feel the ache in her throat from recently crying. But her chest also feels lighter than it has in a long time, and she can feel the sun on her face through the window.

She isn’t happy yet. She has a long way to go before happiness, she thinks. But her dad got there. It took him years, but he did.

She will too.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song "One More Time With Feeling" by Regina Spektor.


End file.
